Active Inquiry

TOTOL – Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratory

16th February, 2016 - Posted by Gavin - Comments Off on TOTOL – Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratory

This week Karen talks about her experience of our TOTOL group:

On Wednesday 3rd February we held our first session of a new group – TOTOL, Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratory. It was playful and fun with the group often commenting that we should not forget that the work should be fun.

The session started with sharing a minute with your partner about who you are and why you were there. This was an interesting exercise to see how pairs used this minute and who spoke more. My partner said an amazing sentence to me which was “I believe this is the way we can get things done”. I really agreed with her!

Some people were there because they had previous experience with Active Inquiry, some had been invited and some were from the three groups that we are currently working with – Bethany, Alma and Shakti, as well as the 8 of us from the Central Company. It was such a great mixture of people – like a bag of liquorice allsorts!

The images we made of the relationship between teacher and pupil were fascinating to me and brought up lots of memories of my schooling and the way education has changed over the years.

I loved the excitement and energy generated by the younger people there whose eyes were opened to a new way of learning.

I liked how we could just try things, how there was no right or wrong and that we could listen clearly to lots of other people’s perceptions. As someone who is not an academic I learnt much more from this process than I would reading a academic paper.

I suppose that’s why I think TOTOL is is good for me as it gives an apportunity to learn in a practical way with ‘all sorts’ of people with different experiences and reasons for coming to the group. There is no hierarchy with everyone being able to speak freely and the respect that everyone in the group has makes a difference.